1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of accessing and, more particularly to a system and method for collecting and supplying ranked and indexed information as a free or premium (e.g. pay) service to users and advertisers.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet has grown to such that it now contains several billion addresses. Each one of these addresses may have an associated website and content which changes without prior notice. Alternatively, websites may be dynamically linked to other sites or to devices via web services or xhtml links. Such changes in content and linkage may occur several million times a day. Oftentimes, these “postings” and changes are initiated by third parties. The search engines and other services looking for such changes may not always locate or index the sites. As a result, the web users may not be aware of postings or changes to these sites.
The increasing need for reliable and up to the minute search, price and news information has made it increasingly difficult to find and rank (e.g. by most recent order) new information one is looking for in the ever growing global Internet. For example, most conventional search and news gathering engines focus on crawling and indexing an existing and mostly static inventory of websites. Due to the sheer size of the internet, there is a growing lag between the time a new or existing site or content of the site is published and the time such information becomes available as indexed data on popular search engines. Although most information on the web is free, many subscribers and advertisers are willing to pay for such information if it can be delivered in a “ranked and indexed” format to each relevant subscriber based on queries supplied by the requestor of the information.
The global economy is becoming more and more integrated. As a result, access in real time to the latest relevant information has become critical to doing business, such information can make the difference between successful companies and unsuccessful companies that lag behind with respect to their ability to react to changes in the marketplace. Presently, the majority of competitive information is delivered by specialty research and financial firms via proprietary subscription to many fragmented networks, such as Bloomberg and Reuters. This information is used primarily by industries, such as the financial markets, which rely on this information. In addition, it is provided without any filtering, and it is up to the user to find relevant data in the vast quantity of publications, such as daily news releases and press announcements.
Although some search functions are available for searching publications, these search functions only provide limited access to on-line information, and cost additional usage fees. In addition, it is up to the user to initiate a query with clear knowledge and understanding of what he is searching for, as well as how to access the information and find its relevance. In most cases, such a search will not include the latest 30-90 days worth of publicly available information that resides somewhere on the World Wide Web (www). The concept of broadcasting the news to many subscribers is not new per se. However, there is no incentive, process or a single location which is capable of accepting, aggregating and redistributing all published information sources, as well as providing a fast and reliable control and query based real-time dissemination of such information. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a way to collect and supply ranked and indexed information service to users and advertisers.
There is also no system that collects and adds advertising or relevant information to such new information and then disseminates it to interested parties and provides for market based pricing for such advertising services.
As the majority of devices connected to the web migrate from being dominated by PCs to wireless handheld devices, the context and form of search and related services need to change to accommodate the special location, size and space limitations of these devices